There are currently a number of advertising services in use on the Internet today. These advertising services facilitate buying and selling advertising space on merchant web sites. If a merchant wishes to buy advertising space (i.e. wishes to pay to have advertisements displayed on other web sites), the merchant contracts such an advertising service, negotiates a contract, and pays according to terms of the contract. If a merchant wishes to sell advertising space (i.e. wishes to get something of value in exchange for displaying advertisements for other merchants), the merchant registers with such an advertising service, then places special advertisement hyperlinks on the merchant's web site.
The term merchant is used here to indicate the owner or operator of a (computer) server linked to a network, such as the Internet, and able to publish information on the network. The information published by a first merchant could be pay-per-view information or an advertisement of goods and services offered by a first merchant, or the information could be an advertisement of goods and services offered by a second merchant, i.e. a referral to the second merchant. Various advertising systems have been developed to compensate a merchant for providing a referral to another merchant.
In many advertising systems, compensation to merchants who sell advertising space (i.e. who advertise for other merchants) is computed in one of three ways: per impression, per visitor, or per sale. Often an advertising service computes and distributes compensation. In the per impression way of computing compensation, such an advertising service counts the number of unique consumers who view the advertisement, and the merchant receives a fixed fee for each. Advertising services that use this method are currently located at the following web sites: http://www.doubleclick.com; http://www.hyperbanner.com; http://www.linkexchange.com; and http://www.smartclicks.com.
In the per visitor (consumer) way of computing compensation, an advertising service counts the number of unique consumers who click on the advertisement, and the merchant receives a fixed fee for each. Advertising services that use this method include: http://www.aaddzz.com; http://www.bannerbrokers.com; http://www.clicktrade.com; and http://www.eads.com.
In the per sale way of computing compensation, a merchant receives a commission when a consumer clicks on an advertising linking the consumer to the server of a merchant and the consumer subsequently purchases goods or services from the merchant through the linked access.
On the Internet, computers access each other through the World Wide Web, a kind of network operating system. In this system, servers and consumer computers are said to reside at web sites. In the prior art of Internet advertising methods, it is common to use some standard procedure for identifying a consumer, or a consumer's computer, so as to track when the consumer accesses a merchant's web site, or when the consumer moves from one web page of a merchant (a quantity of intermission at a web site) to another (at possibly another web site). The tracking is performed by software put in place by the advertising service.
An advertising service may host, on a server operated by the advertising service, an actual advertisement for a merchant, as opposed to a link to an advertisement for the merchant. Then when a consumer selects to view, from a server operated by the merchant, a web page including an advertisement, the advertisement (i.e. the code for constructing its image for display as part of the web page) is actually pulled from the server of the advertising service by means of a link to the advertisement (in the code on the server, operated by the merchant, for constructing the web page). Thus, in an arrangement like this, the advertising service can record access by a consumer to an advertisement.
Alternatively, an advertising service may set up, on a first server operated by the advertising service itself, an advertisement for a merchant's web page stored on a server operated by the merchant, but which includes a link to a second server operated by the advertising service. Then a consumer who accesses the first server and selects to view the web page is directed to the second server operated by the advertising service, which then directs the consumer to the server operated by the merchant where the advertised web page is located. In this arrangement, the second server of the advertising service records access by the consumer of the advertised web page of the merchant.
Recording an access of an Internet server or of a web page on an Internet server is a feature of many commercial web servers. In providing this recording, such a web server may set, on consumer's computer, a so-called cookie (i.e. a persistent state data object, as described e.g. in U.S. Pat. No. 5,774,670) that distinguishes the consumer from other consumers, at least for subsequent accesses to a server in the same second-level Internet domain as the cookie-issuing web server. In the context of the present invention, a cookie is a data object that resides on a consumer's computer and can be updated by the web server that set the cookie on the consumer's computer. Such updating is performed to record, for example, a total number of visits, each visit by the consumer to the cookie-issuing web server. Whether or not a cookie is used in tracking a consumer, a web server may append, for later inspection, information about the consumer's computer (such as its network address) to a local log file (in memory or on storage media). Such consumer tracking is widely used, and is regarded as a valuable source of marketing information.
Thus, the consumer activity on the web leading up to viewing a merchant's web page does not flow according to any one particular structure at the code level; there are many ways a consumer might arrive at a web page, depending on what mechanisms the merchant and advertising service chose to use. In addition, there are many tracks through the web a consumer might take in ending up at a particular web site having a web page the consumer wants to view. A consumer might arrive at a web site by first looking up information in a directory service or search engine. Or a consumer might arrive at a web site by following a helpful sequence of hyperlinks, possibly pointing to several other merchant web sites in the process.
Because of this diversity of activity leading to a consumer viewing a particular web page, there is currently no robust mechanism to determine how the owner of the particular web page might compensate or credit merchants whose web sites were possibly instrumental in the consumer ultimately viewing the particular web page. What is needed is a way to determine what server-operating merchants to compensate, if any, for a consumer viewing a web page of another merchant who is willing to reward for potential referrals to the web page.